Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self

In 1903, Pauline Hopkins wrote something radical: a adventure novel where a light-skinned Black man must reckon with the blood he's tried to deny. Reuel Briggs is a Harvard medical student who has spent his life passing for white and spurning everything African. When he joins an archaeological expedition to Ethiopia, he sees only treasure to plunder. Then he is captured in the ancient buried city of Telassar, ruled by the magnificent Queen Candace, and everything collapses. In a palace of diamonds and forgotten history, Reuel discovers the "other half" of his identity he was taught to despise. Part romance, part psychological thriller, part reclamation of African grandeur, Of One Blood refuses to let its readers look away from the messy, painful, necessary work of racial self-acceptance. Hopkins wrote to "raise the stigma of degradation from the Black race," and she did it with genre fiction that still provokes and moves.